Recently Google rolled out an update on doorway pages. Click here to read the doorway pages update on Google official blog. This update was aimed to remove the spam pages and links from Google to give a better experience to its users.

SEO spam is increasing day by day. More and more people are now jumping into blogging and finding new ways to spam Google search results to increase their site traffic.

Fortunately Google is smarter and it comes out with latest algorithms whenever someone tries to manipulate the search results. This is done just to give better user experience. Although Google is coming up with latest updates such as Panda and Penguin, still most users are finding few ways to manipulate search results. One of them is doorway pages.

What are doorway pages?

If the web pages are manipulating the Google search index, then they are considered as doorway pages. These doorway pages are usually aimed at link building and boosting search engine traffic to pages where only spam links exist.

According to Google, doorway pages can be explained as:

If a user clicks on one result, doesn’t like it, and then tries the next result in the search results page and is taken to that same site – they are known as doorway pages.

How do doorway pages affect search rankings?

If you are knowingly or unknowingly using doorway pages on your sites, de-index them immediately or else Google penalizes your sites for spamdexing (also known as “manipulation of spam indexing”).

They will not only affect your search engine rankings but you will get less to no traffic from Google. So make sure you don’t create such doorway pages on your sites just for the sake of getting links or traffic. It won’t work anymore after the roll out from the Google’s update on doorway pages!

Doorway pages examples

In simple terms, doorway pages are also known as “standalone pages” that are created only to visitors from search engines. These pages are often considered as spam and give bad website navigation to users.

For instance, if you’re searching for “plugins” and instead of getting a plugin site, you get a page that says, “Click here for plugins.” You just did that! Now they’re asking you to do it again. Are you going to click now?

Here are few simple examples to explain doorway pages

Having multiple domain names targeting at specific regions that funnel users to one page

Templates that are made solely for affiliate linking

Multiple pages on your sites with similar content

Let’s demonstrate through a screenshot to easily understand how doorway pages work in general. Have a look at the following image:

Examples of doorway pages!

As you can see, multiple links (often with anchor text) are pointing to major product sections on main site. This often leads to bad user navigation.

For instance, if you are trying to download a song from a music site and when you click on a link, if irrelevant pages to marketing sites appear, they are considered as doorway pages. How frustrating for a visitor it would be?

That’s the reason why doorway pages are bad for search users as they not only give bad user experience and also considered as spam pages.

Doorway pages: How to avoid Google penalty

Doorway pages are often created to manipulate the search results. It means few webmasters try to rank well by creating pages that are spam.

We all know Google has some smart bots and they will never encourage spam practices such as doorway campaigns. The algorithm change will have a great impact on the sites that use doorway pages to manipulate both users and search engines.

Stop using black hat and gray hat techniques if you want to build ethical backlinks to increase your search rankings. Only use white hat SEO techniques such as blog commenting, guest posting, attract natural backlinks to your sites etc., to increase your search visibility for the keywords you are trying to rank for.

Here are few things to remember if you want to avoid penalties from Google.

Make sure you have a proper navigation system on your website that is user friendly. Your website visitors should easily navigate your sites and find if any link is repeated. Remove the redundancy in links if you want to stay safe from Google penalty updates on doorway pages.

Be sure to check out all the pages on your sites and make sure whether all of them provide valuable information to the users and not created just for the sake of particular keywords.

NEVER use multiple number of similar pages with keyword stuffing. It’s the surefire way to get penalized by Google updates on doorway pages.

Try to avoid sub domain and make sure not to copy others content to increase your website traffic.

The best solution to doorway pages penalty by Google

I also suggest you to de-index your doorway pages completely from Google search results and fill your websites with relevant content that is useful for the visitors. Focus on using the right keywords that your prospects might be searching for. Also use social media sites to increase your brand awareness and follow on-page optimization techniques to increase your search rankings.

Final thoughts about doorway pages penalty algorithm

Doorway pages are usually huge number of poor quality pages that are optimized for a specific keyword in order to increase website traffic. Google is strict regarding this and it will penalize any site that uses doorway pages as a way to manipulate search results. So avoid using any tactic to increase your website traffic. If you try to manipulate Google search results, it will permanently ban your sites from search index.

Do you have any more questions related to doorway pages penalty? If yes, please ask them in the comments and I’d be glad to respond to your queries.

In the end, it keeps coming down to the same thing again and again, make quality content. If bloggers would approach their sites from the perspective of caring about the client, this would not be a thing. Now with that said, I get why people are doing these things. It is difficult to compete so you wind up trying “tricks” and I have probably over optimized in the past myself. This is a constant struggle but perhaps, the answer is just to keep providing true and valuable answers.

Thank you for this valuable information. I recently had this manual action by Google on my website regarding doorway pages. But I didn’t create any doorway page. I had an old website. I re-designed it as well as created fresh content and in the process re-directed the old content as I wanted to replace the old content with the new one. I gave fresh SEO Title tag and meta tag descriptions for all pages and posts. I am not able to understand what could have gone wrong? I am 100 precent sure about the quality of my content and its definitely not duplicate. Can you help me understand ow I can resolve the issue? Thank you for your time for reading this article.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Search for:

SEMrush: Free for 30 Days

My Story

BloggersPassion is my online home. Here, I share everything that worked for me to increase my traffic and sales. If you are looking for PROVEN ways to make money blogging, this blog is for you. Read More